


What Stories in the Stars?

by crowforapet



Series: (Re)Finding Our Way [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Confessions, Did I mention this was Soft?, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotions, F/F, Fluff, Kara Danvers is a refugee, Lena Luthor Knows Kara Danvers Is Supergirl, Oneshot, POV Kara Danvers, Soft Supercorp, Stargazing, SuperCorp, oh heck yea it's Emotional Vulnerability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:21:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23053888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowforapet/pseuds/crowforapet
Summary: Making the best out of a mission she was specifically kept out of, Kara takes Lena out stargazing. Still navigating the resurrection of their friendship, Lena and Kara broach some very personal subjects in their conversation. Confessions are made.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Series: (Re)Finding Our Way [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1656208
Comments: 7
Kudos: 166





	What Stories in the Stars?

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in a timeline that assumes Lena and Kara have talked things out and are in the active process of rebuilding their friendship. You can sorta connect it to my other fic, A Language of Apology, but like, if the end of the 6th chapter didn't happen.
> 
> Written for my loser friend, you know who you are.

Part of being friends and coworkers with brilliant scientist slash CEO Lena Luthor was that she had a _lot_ of places to go in any scenario, often out of the city. This was especially useful for those classic missions when being around tall buildings meant civilian casualties and property damage that carved new fissures into the national debt deeper than the Marianas Trench.

The more isolated of properties were also great for whatever super-secret lab stuff that Lena had been working on. Like this one, for example. Kindly and jointly run by L-Corp and the American government (corporate lobbying who?), the lab was in some middle-of-the-map state whose only landmarks were the Flattest Field in the Central USA and– well, nothing else, actually. But Kara had “had” to go hide there for “national security” and her “own personal wellbeing” until the DEO finished “dealing with” an “anti-Kryptonian zealot”.

“Are you just saying that to get rid of me?” Kara had wondered accusingly. But Alex had scowled at her.

“Stop thinking the worst, silly. We just want you safe. Supergirl sits this one out.”

She’d huffed and pouted about it, but it was okay in the end, because Kara hadn’t needed to go alone. Lena had joined her, insisting it was the best place to test her new satellite tech, because the non-population of the area meant there was a superb lack of light pollution.

Did Kara mention it was in the middle of _nowhere?_

Seriously, she couldn’t even order takeout. Sure, she could go out and pick some up and be back in less time than it would take for a car to find them all the way out here, but it was the _principle_ of the thing!

But one of the better things about being in with Lena Luthor and the consequential if questionable government organizations was that, while they had a base _so_ in the middle of nowhere that there was zero light pollution, _they had a base_ so _in the middle of nowhere that there was zero light pollution._

Nowhere meant privacy. And it meant Kara could _see the stars_.

She’d taken Lena with her, obviously, because how could she pass up stargazing with her best friend? The last near-death experience had shocked both of them into apologizing, and they’d only been growing closer since then.

It had taken a metric shitton of communication and even more patience to rebuild the trust that had been lost between them, but now Kara felt they had made something new together from mutual honesty, and she was sure Lena agreed. They’d even made a pact: never to lie to each other again. The intention was for this rule to prevent secrets like last time – Lena for the Kryptonite and shady alien-human relations, and Kara for, well, a _lot_ to be honest – but really, what it ended up meaning was more openness in their conversations, a foundation of non-judgment and sincerity that resonated into every facet of their friendship.

The past few months she’d sensed a shift in their relationship, as they found their footing with each other again. The illumination of new truths meant that, while some things remained the same, others necessarily were forced to change. Kara no longer had the luxury of obscuring her disapproval of Lena’s politics behind her dual identity – any criticisms she had needed to be voiced by Kara _and_ Supergirl, who were one and the same. And Lena couldn’t hide behind her professional demeanour any longer when she collaborated with Supergirl and couldn’t pretend she had no feelings; Kara found herself privy to details of Lena’s past she never would have shared with her before.

And yet, despite these new responsibilities to each other, Kara had never felt lighter.

It was difficult, sure, but it was _nice_ , for the most part. Immeasurably better than the alternative. Kara never wanted to lose Lena again.

So here they were, in a fallow field in midsummer, their bodies resting on a blanket that was trampling the grasses below. They’d started the night at dusk, when their ordinary complaints about work heralded the arrival of the evening star, and now, embroiled in the full expanse of night, they had been silent for an entire half hour. Kara’s eyes were burning new holes in the starry indigo canvas in the direction she’d decided to imagine Krypton had been, the familiar pangs of sorrow radiating from the cringing mass of her heart.

 _Rao_ , if only…

“Do you miss it?” Lena broached their quietude with a voice as soft as the pads of her fingers, which were tracing Kara’s arm in slow, circling patterns.

Kara swallowed. Sometimes her friend was so intuitive it was scary. She didn’t want to turn this night maudlin, but how could she lie? Not when she’d fought so hard for the truth.

The truth it was.

“Every day,” she admitted, and her heart stammered at being put into words.

In the corner of her vision, Kara saw Lena frown, and her worries went into overdrive. Shit, maybe she should have lied. Was it too much to say, when Lena was still getting used to the idea of having an alien for a best friend?

But Lena’s words weren’t harsh or filled with disappointment. Alex had been right; she really needed to stop jumping to the worst conclusions. “Do you… do you remember it?”

Were they doing this? Did Lena really want to know?

All in or nothing, Kara reminded herself. No lies, not anymore.

“I do,” she said, “I was thirteen when I had to leave. They sent me away to protect Kal.” She licked her lips, “Well, you know _his_ story…”

She’d ridden out into the universe with the flash of an exploding planet as her people’s final farewell. Kara had been so young and _afraid_ , staring ahead into the starry void as though it could have possibly held solace in it for a young girl on the brink of her people’s extinction. But maybe it had been; that direction in space, at least, didn’t allow her to see the destruction of her home.

Was it better to have been facing away? Kara would never know. She couldn’t compare her experience of visual nothingness to the view of the ships in orbit around Krypton, which she imagined were cluttered with bodies straining against the windows in bewilderment at the scene beneath them, unwittingly reaching for their deaths.

And she couldn’t fathom, except in nightmares, what it would have been like on-planet, without the birds-eye view of annihilation, knowing only that the space between you and your loved ones was immeasurably large, that even as you clasped them tight to your chest the blast would hit one of you first, and they would exit the world alone a microsecond, an atom’s width, before you did.

Kara would never know what her people felt when they died, because she had escaped, and they hadn’t. But she still had dreams, night terrors, where she could see the dim yellow lights of her planet in periphery shift to the deoxygenated blue of fire in space, where cyan backlit her entire world in death.

“God, Kara,” Lena’s voice was wet and thick, “I’m sorry. I can’t even imagine…”

No one could, really. Other refugees, sometimes. But even Kal was affected differently, growing up and strong in the glow of a yellow sun without the shadow of his past to haunt him. He didn’t remember what it was like to be powerless, to see the faces of his parents – his Kryptonian ones – flashing in his memory like an afterimage, as a star he wasn’t supposed to live beneath gifted him the skies.

When she flew, Kara sometimes thought she heard her mother’s voice with the wind, soft and lilting like it was when she sang her to sleep in her native language. Kal-El hadn’t grown up bilingual, taunted by dreams in Kryptonian, and awaking in panic as each day that passed yielded the loss of vocabulary, words he never got the chance to practise slipping away from memory as surely and as easily as the sun rose every morning. Each word, each grammatical structure Kara forgot was a piece of her history, her home, that was rent from her, gone forever into what used to _be_. No, Kal hadn’t grown up the same at all.

“It’s okay,” she said to Lena, trying to muster all the brightness she could. She was Kara Danvers, dammit, and she was peppy! “They’re a part of me, even though they’re not, well, _here._ And I have an Earth family now!”

It was the truth, but not the whole truth. There was a thickness in her throat that lied by omission.

Lena didn’t seem to notice, or she didn’t want to call her on it.

“But your… I just. I’m sorry,” Lena said, her voice husky and strange, “Here I am, getting emotional when you’ve carried this with you most of your life. It’s not my sorrow to feel.”

If she’d been feeling a bit happier, Kara would have wrinkled her nose at such a ridiculously Lena thing to say. As it was, her lips twitched upward, just a bit.

“Um, I’m pretty sure that’s called feeling _empathy_? And it’s a good thing. And…” Kara sighed, “I might have a lot of practise at dealing with it, but it’s…” How honest was she prepared to be? “–it’s not like it ever goes away, you know? The grief. It sticks to– sticks _with_ you. Like having a friend, I guess, but if that friend was invisible and… sad.”

An extra organ. An extra limb. A secret corruption that could creep up on anniversaries or when you least expected it.

“I’m sorry for bringing it up,” Lena told her, choosing not to comment on the empathy thing, “I don’t want to make you sad.”

“Aww, you love me,” Kara teased without thinking, pulling her arm from Lena’s ministrations and turning over to tug her closer with both hands. A moment later, noticing her friend had gone very still and very quiet, Kara realized what she said. Heat pooled in her face and she was immensely grateful for the lack of light pollution that reflected brightness in the city smog, because she really couldn’t have borne it if Lena had seen her right now.

The mistake hung suspended like an electrical storm, tense and amplified with potential. Thank god for the night, and the absence of moon. Only the stars were witness.

If it weren’t for her super hearing, Kara’s anxieties would have drowned out the words. Lena’s mouth scarcely parted to form them, almost as if they had been conceived in a place other than her body, immaculately placed on the edge of her lips just to escape once more into the expectant air.

“I do.”

Lightning crackled in her brain as all thinking short-circuited. Kara blinked, and her own voice felt too loud against Lena’s weightless breath. “You what?”

Her tongue was heavy and over-large in her skull. She was stupidity incarnate. What she had heard could not be real, because Kara did not exist in paradise.

But Lena tilted her head to face her, and Kara’s alien eyesight meant that when she saw, she saw all of her, darkness be damned. Lena’s features were composed, but her eyes were vivid and shiny with emotion. “I do,” she repeated, “Love you.”

Kara couldn’t breathe. Who needed oxygen, anyway? “Oh… me. You– me? You. Really?”

“I–” Lena hissed a breath out, fidgeting. She tilted her head away, so her profile was illuminated by the violet haze of the Milky Way. A dim light effused across the horizon of her features, though most of her face was shadowed, and Lena suddenly looked spectral. Kara had never seen anything more beautiful; she had never felt more afraid. Here she was, atoms apart from the woman of her dreams, and she was about to lose her if she didn’t _do_ something.

She had been holding her breath for so long that when she tried to speak her words so they rang out as boldly as the airplanes that dared to scar the night sky with their flashing signals, they instead wisped from her lips like the ghostly trails of tropospheric clouds.

“It would be nice,” Kara breathed, lying perfectly, unequivocally still, “if you did.”

Kara Danvers was brave. She was _strong_. But something about the way she saw Lena’s eyelashes flutter, blinking once slowly at Kara’s admission, made her feel more helpless than with all the Kryptonite in the universe.

Then Lena turned towards Kara, and the warm air from those eternally red and parted lips tickled at her neck. She could feel Lena’s nose at her ear, not touching, but only _just_ not so. If she tilted her gaze to match, Kara realized, they would collide. Already the nearness stung, like the precipice of static electricity, and who knew what anything more could do?

So, she moved only her eyes instead.

What she found were pale eyes eclipsed by expanded pupils from the dark, the afternoon blue of Lena’s irises now black holes of some unfathomable emotion. Kara found herself held by them, arrested in their pull. It wasn’t cowardice, she lied. Just physics.

A warbling smile brokered light as the glow of the stars met impossibly white teeth. Lena’s expression teetered there for a moment, caught in a haze of uncertainty, before what must have been fear was discarded and her entire face split into a beam of unapologetic joy. Those black hole eyes now sheened with wet and affection, and if that itself were not enough, the sounds she formed next were radiant enough to fuel a city.

“Good,” she murmured, brazen and tender, “because _I_ _love you_ , Kara Danvers.”

The world bloomed. Kara choked on the christened air as she gasped, her hand finding Lena’s on its own accord, their fingers weaving themselves together. Her heart had ripped free of its cage; it was rocketing to space and back again. Kara leaned her head back so it wouldn’t collide with Lena’s. The other woman’s face swam in her vision as her eyes clogged with unreleased tears.

She needed to speak. She couldn’t speak. She had to. What could she _say_?

“You…” Kara stammered, the noise bursting whatever invisible wall contained her, and suddenly she was grinning, her smile blossoming across her face. The sound that leapt unbidden from her lips might have been a sob or it might have been laughter, but it was entirely joyful. “Really?”

A night-chilled finger wiped the wetness from Kara’s lashes. She blinked away the rest and opened her eyes to see Lena with a matching grin, the brunette’s eyes glazed and gorgeous like glass sculptures. Lena’s unbridled happiness, no longer stifled and concealed under her mask of nonchalance, was the clearest of skies. It was the cleanest air. It was more metaphors than Kara could imagine and then some. If she hadn’t tailored her writing to journalism instead of creative work, she would have dedicated the rest of her life to poetry of this moment.

“Yes, Kara,” Lena told her, the purity of her expression complicating into fond teasing. The familiarity of it jostled a creeping flush onto Kara’s face, though she wasn’t embarrassed.

“I… _wow_ ,” she breathed, her mind racing through cycles of disbelief and gratitude with more manic speed than when she’d beaten Barry in their race.

Lena huffed a laugh, withdrawing her hand from Kara’s. The Kryptonian felt its loss for a short moment, before it was replaced with the new and reassuring weight of an arm over her waist. Lena splayed her fingers across Kara’s back, gentle pressure encouraging her to shuffle closer. Kara fished her own arm from out between them and cast it around Lena, mirroring the gesture. They lay there, in tight embrace, until the beats of their separate hearts could no longer be distinguished.

“Well?” Lena ventured, the twist of her mouth in a smirk.

Kara hadn’t stopped grinning – she didn’t think her face remembered other configurations – but now she felt her brow slip downwards and furrow in confusion.

“Well what?”

Lena’s chuckle was a full sensory experience. Her breath ghosted hot against Kara’s face as the gentle jostling of her chest nudged Kara’s own. “I just told you I loved you. You write words for a living; are you going to tell me you can’t think of anything better to say than ‘wow’?”

It was Kara’s turn to laugh, the force of her mirth shaking her entire body. She drew Lena close, sliding the hand at her back up to cup behind Lena’s head. She _felt_ the woman’s heartbeat quicken as her lips dusted over Lena’s ear.

Softly, confidently, she said: “Lena Luthor, _I love you_.”

Kara smudged away the tears that fell with her lips and lowered her head to rest again on the earth, forehead to forehead with her best friend in the world.

“Not bad for a first draft exposé,” Lena murmured, laughing, “but I think we’ll have to get documented proof at some point.”

“If you want me to kiss you,” Kara admonished dutifully, “you could just _say_.”

The glint of mischief was back in Lena’s pale eyes, which were now staring at Kara greedily, to her absolute _delight_. They weren’t done talking about this, weren’t nearly done saying all the things that needed to be said. The emptiness in the sky where a planet should have been still yawned a scar, and their rekindled friendship was raw and tender like newly healed flesh. But for the moment, with the night stretched above them, blanketing their bodies in the intimacy of darkness, everything was okay. It was perfection.

“ _Well_ then,” said Lena, leaning in. Her next words were muffled against Kara’s skin. “In _that_ case…”

And after that?

Well.


End file.
